Kazukuru language

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Kazukuru
Spoken in:	Solomon Islands
Region:	New Georgia
Total speakers:	extinct [1]
Language family:	perhaps Oceanic Kazukuru
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`–`
ISO 639-3:	`kzk`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Kazukuru is an extinct language that was once spoken in New Georgia, Solomon Islands. The Dororo and Guliguli languages (also extinct) are supposedly its only known relations. The speakers of Kazukuru gradually merged with the Roviana people from the sixteenth century onward, and adopted Roviana as their language. Kazukuru was last recorded in the early twentieth century when its speakers were in the last stages of language shift. Today Kazukuru is the name of a clan in the Roviana people group.

Most of what is known about Kazukuru was collected by W.H.L. Waterhouse and published with S.H. Ray in an article in 1931. Some additional Kazukuru data and the only information on Dororo and Guliguli (two short wordlists) were published by Peter Lanyon-Orgill in 1953. Arthur Capell suggested that Kazukuru was a non-Austronesian ( Papuan) language, and Stephen Wurm accordingly placed all three languages in a 'Kazukuru family' within the East Papuan phylum.

In a recent article, Michael Dunn and Malcolm Ross (2007) argue that the structure, phonology and lexicon of Kazukuru are strikingly similar to other Oceanic languages, and that Kazukuru was almost certainly an Oceanic language, related to other New Georgia languages such as Roviana, Hoava and Ghanongga. The alleged Dororo and Guliguli wordlists are so similar to the recorded Kazukuru wordlist that they are almost certainly different transcriptions of the same language.